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Translator of Demian by Hermann Hesse into English - an interlinear translation for German students and those who want to see the original text.
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/mithradates
Fluent in Japanese, Korean. Proficient in Mandarin, Turkish, German, French, Portuguese, others.

Monday, September 15, 2008

Map of the official language forms of Norwegian municipalities as of 2007

There is almost no information on Norwegian in Korean at present - in a big bookstore like Bandi & Luni's for example there's a total of two books on the language and no dictionaries. Luckily one of them is cheap and not too bad, and also has an example near the end of the differences between Bokmål (the standard used by some 90% of the country) and Nynorsk (the other standard based on the dialects found around the country).

Here's the example the book gives on the differences between the two, a text written by Leif Mæhle, a professor of Nynorsk Literature at the University of Oslo. The words that are different in Nynorsk from Bokmål are in bold.

In the long period when Denmark and Norway were in union (around 400 years), Danish was required as a written language in Norway and when the union was dissolved in 1814, almost all Norwegians wrote purely in Danish.

It is these two roads that have led to the two language forms we have today -- Bokmål, which is the result of the original Danish written language in Norway, and Nynorsk, which is a written language built on that found in the dialects around the country.

From a purely language-learning point of view, Nynorsk is harder to learn than Bokmål given the extra gender (Bokmål technically has three but you don't really have to concern yourself with the feminine gender as a student) and more complex formation of the plural in particular.

The book also gives the following progression from urnordisk (the original Viking language from 800-1050) to the modern Scandinavian languages in terms of similarity as follows:

All this talk about different forms for the language can scare people away from learning the language though, but I wouldn't worry about it: reading Nynorsk is no harder for a person that knows Bokmål to read than English written in a dialect, and given that Bokmål is used in urban areas and most people that go to a place like Norway to live for a long period of time will likely be doing so because of a job offering (most of which are located in large cities), there's no real need to give it that much thought besides recognizing in general how the two can differ. Kva for hva, plurals will often end in -ar instead of -er, and that sort of thing.

Don't forget that a language like German has a ton of regional and national variations too, and that doesn't stop anybody from learning it either. In fact, with three national standards (standard German, Austrian German, Swiss German) and over 30 regional variations, I would submit that Norwegian is actually a much more unified language than German is. A lot of these varieties of German are considered to be their own languages and have their own Wikipedias, whereas in Norwegian there are only two Wikipedias. Behold the 35 regional variations of German:

Wikipedia gives a list of 20 Norwegian dialects, less than the 35 given for German. 20 vs. 35 is still a lot of dialects and there's no 100% workable definition on what constitutes a dialect and what doesn't, but suffice to say that languages in Europe all have a very distinct character by region and if the argument is to be made that a language like Norwegian (Danish too by the way) isn't worth learning because of the number of dialects, then it has to be made for languages like German too.